Owens J. Dust. The Story of the Modern World in a Trillion Particles

Hodder & Stoughton, 2023. — 400 p.Dust - The Story of the Modern World in a Trillion Particles by Jay Owens is combining history and science as it offers a sweeping look at the smallest substance and the biggest challenges facing people and the planet. Four and a half billion years ago, planet Earth was formed from a vast spinning nebula of cosmic dust, the detritus left over from the birth of the sun. Within the next one hundred years, life on Earth would be profoundly changed by heat, drought, fire, and, again, dust. Dust is a legacy of twentieth-century progress and a toxic threat to life in the changing climate of the twenty-first. And yet dust is something we hardly ever consider—so small and mundane. Jay Owens’s Dust corrects that oversight, sparking curiosity and wonder. This is a book on humanity and Earth and what we’ve done to it. Dust moves from the suburbs of a thirsty Los Angeles to Oklahoma and its Dust Bowl migrants, and the desert Southwest where nuclear testing created radioactive fallout that spread across America. Owens visits the dessiccated remains of the Aral Sea in Central Asia, the Greenland Ice Sheet, and beyond. Smart and beautifully written, Dust helps us understand our legacy and the challenges we face, building big ideas from the smallest particles.My focus is on humanmade dust: an anthropocentric approach, certainly, but how else to understand the Anthropocene? We are world-makers, now, and this is a new geological age. The world’s biogeophysical systems have been altered by human action: not just the carbon cycle, but nitrogen and phosphorous too; the freshwater cycle, the vast erosive flows of sand and soil; the air and water and rock of the entire globe. Gradually and then suddenly – and not at all equally – our species has transformed from passive passengers on this rock in space to modern Prometheans, setting fire to the planet and finding that it does indeed burn. The scale of this shift – and its consequences, the present and future harm – is incredibly hard to think about. We find it easiest to imagine things at human scale, at the size of our body parts – centimetres, feet, metres – and ideally from around one to a dozen of these things, numbers we can count on our fingers. Most people have an intuitive sense of scale down to a thousand times smaller (millimetres), and a thousand times larger (kilometres). But beyond that, instinct tends to fail us. So this is one reason to think with dust: to challenge ourselves to try to see the world at scales beyond our easy imaginings. The dust we’re talking about in this book is almost always sub-millimetre in scale, and very often a hundred or thousand times smaller than that – i.e. 1 to 10 micrometres in size. Invariably dust particles get compared to a human hair in scale – which averages 70–90 micrometres in diameter depending on the origins of the owner. But dust is often a hundred times smaller. Dust dances right at the limit of our vision, or more precisely our visual acuity: the ability of an unaided human eye to perceive an object as distinct.Table of ContentsIntroduction
The Suburbs of Hell
Turn That Country Dry
Dust to Dust
Cleanliness and Control
The Vanished Sea
Fallout
The Ice Record
Dust Is Part of the Earth’s Metabolism
Payahuunadü
Coda
Acknowledgements
Notes